Not without a ring, you don’t.

Mr Fawlty, 81, said it would be impossible to continue running the hotel if forced to stop discriminating between “le ton” and the hoi polloi. “We get all sorts of rabble as it is. I go into the rooms to collect the breakfast trays and sometimes find the complementary Daily Mail has been absolutely untouched,” he says. “So of course I spit in their scotch broth at lunch. I’m only human.

“Just last week I let a twin room, in all good faith, to a couple of wholesome-looking and well-spoken young men. When they were checking out, they said the single beds had been a bit small, so they were very glad of the spacious bathtub!

“Time was when you could bash a Spaniard with a teaspoon and more or less get away with it. Nowadays, just because someone pays for a room, you’re expected to let them treat it as a room they’ve paid for! It’s political correctness gone coal. No, not coal. Wallaby?”

Asked for comment, Mrs Fawlty said: “He told me he had a dicky ticker. That was in 1968.”